Word: populists
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...coincidence that the day before Obama announced his latest push to crack down on big banks, his confidants David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett met with Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) watchdog Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual mother of the consumer agency and the most prominent populist advocate for financial reform. "They made it very clear that Wall Street needs to stop acting like nothing has changed," Warren told TIME...
...also no coincidence that the President made his announcement while standing next to the unlikeliest populist advocate for financial reform, 82-year-old former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, a previously marginalized Obama adviser who had chastised the Administration for making insufficient efforts to limit the size and risk profiles of big banks. The White House is tired of complaints that its economic team - especially Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the former New York Fed president who helped bail out AIG and other failing firms - is too close to Wall Street. Bringing the legendary gray eminence in from the cold - Obama...
...Republicans say they haven't seen any downside yet to opposing reform. Brown actually stepped into Obama's populist trap by opposing the bank tax, and it didn't seem to help his opponent, Martha Coakley, even though internal polling gave her a 21-point advantage when it came to "taking on Wall Street." Why? "People thought Democrats in Washington would not deliver on these issues," says her pollster, Celinda Lake...
...telling story. For one thing, it's a reminder that Geithner is the kind of guy who hosts dinners for bankers. He's not a populist; he's allergic to populists, and so are his aides. Behind closed doors, Treasury officials can sound like their MoveOn.org caricatures, griping about "wacko populists" who use "anticapitalist rhetoric" to "extract their pound of flesh from the Street" - even making excuses for the megabankers who no-showed a recent White House meeting with Obama. ("I wouldn't say they blew him off," said one Treasury aide.) Geithner has opposed proposals to tax Wall Street...
...financial products and otherwise overhaul the regulatory system that failed so dramatically in 2008. Geithner sees big banks not as evil empires to be toppled but as moneymaking machines to be restrained, so that the panic and bailouts of two years ago are never repeated. Just because it's populist, he likes to say, doesn't mean it's wrong. (See award-winning pictures of the fallout from the financial meltdown...